well i'm tom arbonne in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. earlier this week thousands of people flooded the michigan state capital protesting governor rick snyder and his state's new right to work for a las law where these union busting laws come from in the first words also wal-mart workers are taking another step toward a decent living tomorrow as workers around the globe participate in a day of action against the world's largest corporation were demonstrations expected to be held and will these global protests do the trick and force wal-mart to finally listen to its employees and later in the show we'll have a your take my take a live segment your chance to call in and ask

a question or make a comment live on the air. you need to know this everybody wants to be a star that's the refrain of the old song of the same name and apparently that everybody includes want to be comedian steven crowder who's got a little viewed web you tube web site from which he's trying to make a living and appears that in his rush to fame crowder honked sean hannity last night for. at the giant protest against michigan's new right to work for less money in law crowder apparently provoked a union member so badly the guy was knocked to the ground and he came back up he came up swinging and true andrew breitbart style crowder played the helpless victim and hannity stepped right into it referring to union thugs in a set up and giving crowder several minutes of airtime. in just a few short minutes i'll be joined live by stephen crowder now crowder who you can

see on the screen left is a fox news contributor and he was in lansing today he was viciously assaulted by a union member of that tent that organization quickly became the target of angry human demonstrators and as you can see the mob of left wing thugs ultimately tore down the structure and they did so with people inside by the next day it became pretty obvious to everybody that crowder had plonked and having provoked the union guy into taking a swing at him in the first place so hannity had him back on along with another fox contributor in the sullivan so that sullivan could set the record straight. listen first of all that tape was very well edited i happened to see some footage where it looked that he actually pushed the guy down to the ground and that was the fellow that was actually striking him and that's the way it looked to me and if that was the case we we just showed i think the tape that you're talking about well you hold him back you're missing a lot of the whole thing all you're missing

a line segment that i saw in the room and in the room holds the second hand because this is what carolyn not exactly had it right i saw that guy's back go down and then he came up well he's a feel good story is what is that favorite to go down he was a passing offense when i will he was a type one is hands down what were you doing. i want to do that i was insulting to your husband then you deserve you would you are. just a union member tom doc worth who was there told the story of how one of the guys who'd been a gatekeeper for the gov brothers americans for prosperity had himself helped bring the tent down. i saw the general in with the n.r.a. kept in and. he was the one who'd been a rap side the americans for prosperity ten all all the print is correct and he was inside the tent earlier and he was talking to the people that were inside the tent and he was milling about the the entrance i think he was controlling what was going in and out that was my impression anyway later on when i saw him again he was doing

the straps to the side wall pulls and kicking them in and then subsequently the. the big main tent poles small ones came down but the they came down from the inside they were basically fell straight down instead of. over like a top like a tree would topple over they basically just came straight down so it looked like to me that the came down from the inside on purpose. as the koch brothers funded provocation on ravel zx people of michigan are in shock that their right to unionize has been blown up by republican governor rick snyder and his koch funded republicans in the state legislature and it could get worse president of the right wing national right to work legal defense fund mark mick's told the washington post quote if michigan to do it that i think everybody ought to think about it and quote he then said he's very confident that at least one more state will go right to work

for less by the end of next year kentucky's republican senator rand paul said he looks forward to right for work right to work for less coming to his home state of kentucky even in union strongholds like new jersey republican state lawmakers are floating the idea of right to work for less republican governors in pennsylvania wisconsin and ohio of all shied away from jamming through right to work for less in their states michigan governor rick snyder appeared hesitant to it was until he surprised everyone in a state last week and called on his republican colleagues in the state legislature to pass that right to work for less law it's time to strap in an epic fight for organized labor in america is under way in the middle class itself is a stake but where are these laws come from in the first place if you don't answer that is mark eighteen stone the editor of the exiles senior editor at n s f w corp and author of the book going postal rage murder and rebellion from reagan's

workplaces to clinton's columbine and marc welcome to the program. baser be on top thanks for joining us and for this great brilliant article you wrote i read about it for a couple hours on the radio today to your latest article on and as have w. corp you trace the history of these right to work for less laws so let's start at the beginning what was it like for workers trying to organize the late one thousand the early twentieth century before the new deal here in the united states. just you know were incredibly violent and impossible. so. what i try to do is give a context people because this is one of the big missing parts of our sort of pop culture history or just general history. the enormous amount of oppression and violence that union organizers based for decades until f.d.r. passed the wagner act really and the new deal and that's why ever since that business has i mean this sort of look at the new deal is like their version of the holocaust

and they look at the under might it not do it ever sense and we've too many things for granted in our history we don't even know i don't think a lot of people understood outside the labor world outside world what right to work is and i think the kind of a ten percent right can work sounds way to some mystically. evil especially when republicans are saying it they don't really know why it's so necessary or why labor people certain. want to go bad beginning can we start at rockefeller's colorado mines in one nine hundred thirteen just as an example point told our leaders our drive at the history of the massacres like a lot of us occurred colorado. just to give us a sense of how hard it was when they try to organize their minds there and rockefeller's people want to run it armored cars with mounted machine guns straining these tent cities where miners are pretty horrible lives then to live in sort of company areas they were given scrutiny. they were paid

a lot scrip i saw some of this russia in the one nine hundred ninety s. instead of actually cashing then they could only use the script in the company and the company stores that really horrible rates and then even so they were striking trying to get a union power trying to get you know their fair fair wages and and laws apply and buy and so on and rockefeller responded with machine guns they then went so far as they were terrorized by owners and their families to basically the women and children dug like this giant bunker beneath some of the tents he had the children and the women and then at night time the color international guard by now kerosene doused the tents with it while they went to sleep in gaza tents kerosene living on fire and shot a bunch of people as they try but heal over a dozen children and in the end when the love massacre was over well over a hundred people were killed but as is the case with so many of these massacres of

labor organizers their families we don't even know the phone number the same thing that happened as another example in the early twenties in west virginia what my heirs there tried to organize it resulted in actual aerial bombardments first by the my company early one boardman's using gas and bombs striking my ears and. then president harding was charles koch favorite president by the way if you read some of his newsletters even sent troops and billy mitchell took them to the american air force to drop some of the air on american citizens so that's what they faced on top of the red scare court asians the beatings the fire it so on and so are they had no rights and when they tried to get those rights. they suffered really seriously and president harding by the way has his campaign slogan in one nine hundred twenty was more business and government less government and business and she's you know it's bizarre it's kind of

a reagan esque always vance muse you write about him and someone like a cracker beginning to track how where this euphemism came from right to work because obviously it was created by p.r. people for big business and kind of surprised we ever people didn't do this. and it turns out that it was the brainchild of this guy vance spence muses like a cross between colorado of his day karl rove and. absolute fascist racist anti-semite you know he lobbied against women's suffrage against child labor was openly racist and anti-semitic he and his sister who controlled the organization that invented right to work the the right to work and and slogan that we used today so he says he was he was for a while. sponsored by a local texas all workers kind of like a coke type big name was john kirby he was

a big oil man and lumber man you know the coke ok histories there are two main businesses are petroleum and george pacific loaners is kind of simple and and this guy he made it made headlines again in one nine hundred thirty six when he tried turning southerners against the democrat party gets at the arc by grant. the publishing ability could photos of eleanor roosevelt be escorted around howard university by two african-american professors and actually in these races conventions that. bans the use sort of put together it did really stir up a lot of the major in recent days and guy mark we have just just a minute left what what would you want people to know about right to work for a loss that they don't understand right to work. in china that this organization called christian american run my pants views and you know that it was it was.

gansa good with that he does the answer uses organization christian american was a lie. they invented right to work they invented the slogan and then they ran through these laws through a lot of parts of the south but they but they had a better chance and in fact in texas texas was going to pretty well entrenched you know i say nine hundred forty five views success from basically destroyed. the labor movement there with the right to work laws you know he was investigated by the f.b.i. for corruption was constantly dragged before congress for for also corruption scandals and like i said he was in bed eight cases this is where it all started this this is the the roots of right to work it's amazing mark ames mark thanks so much for being with us tonight. much appreciate coming up it's bad enough the government can read our e-mail start texts and listen to our phone calls but

they're not stopping there what's the latest attack on your privacy rights and why will it make you think twice about how you commute to work. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harkin welcome to the big picture.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call a donor. i'm sorry i'm just a guy here's an awful lot of money for you sir are you know what kind of my terror cells in your neighborhood want to give us a defeat terrorism the only liberal and the christian. can you believe that it's. going to put you to distract us from what you and i should care about because there are profit driven industry that facials that garbage you call that breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that.

is heard is be careful what you say next time you're on the bus microphone enabled surveillance systems are being installed on public buses in san francisco baltimore and several other cities at the behest of the department of homeland security they've been put there to eavesdrop on passengers private conversations transit officials say the recording devices are to keep passengers safe and resolve disputes privacy experts disagree and point out numerous civil liberties violations the first being. valence without a warrant there's also concern that the audio recording devices could be paired with facial recognition software to immediately identify who's talking for more of what you need to know about this latest intrusion by the security state state security industrial complex i see here is

a means to be part of the litigation counsel of epic the electronic information privacy center. and the welcome back having seen having me thanks thanks for joining us. did i summarize this royd they're actually going to put microphones now in boxes in the well actually the funny thing is the microphones are already there they've been taping people on buses for a very long time and the cameras that they use are enabled to pick up sound now they're actually going to start listening to it recording it and keeping that information for a period of thirty days so they're actually enabling tech enabling technology they had purchased a long time ago and starting to use it to conduct even more surveillance of transit passengers how could this be abused in many different ways i mean if you look at surveillance programs that the government has put into place before i think the best analogy here is the department of homeland security social media monitoring program where they wanted to look at different issues to see if there were

terrorist attacks if they could. predict certain issues before they came up by what people were tweeting what they ended up doing was actually looking for instances where people were badmouthing the department of homeland security which is not at all what is what you think of if it's meant to keep you safe why are they looking at criticism of the government i don't you know i don't think the terrorists are going to be sitting around complaining about exactly what this story that's that's for any chance that this is going to be privatized or end up in corporate hands and we see so much you know concern about you know google storing information. and there's always a possibility that that can happen almost long as it's in government hands so this is something that tax taxpayers are actually paying. to be the target of and hit surveillance without i mean we have a long history in this country only the government is only supposed to surveil people if they have probable cause if they get a warrant not everybody is supposed to be the target of investigation but you see increasingly we're moving into a society where everybody is automatically

a suspect and the crimes that haven't been committed yet and we're all under surveillance leading up to some potential crime in the future and we're told it's for our safety but we're giving up a lot how is this different from the cameras that just catch you if you drive by you know the speeding cameras for example that they're also using for surveillance or. it isn't and i mean when you talk about going from the video recording which again has been done on buses for a long time in the audio recording or video recording of cars i mean they're not placing this in your car gets there is technology that could be used in cars to what we can use those lo jack exist teams and they can use across your cell phone too i suppose. if you are going to see this in stores is going to be a commercial places or is this right now just in the public sector arenas you know buses public transit things like that though the reason that this is legal for the most part is because they say that when you get on public transportation your

consenting to the surveillance so it's going to be an issue of if private store other locations can infer the same consent from people just by entering into a certain area but because this is public transportation and because it really only affects passengers this is really going to be a incredibly invasive policy that has disparate impacts on certain populations and it's just an incredible intrusion is there arguments we need for it. i mean the only argument i've seen for it is the safety argument but as i've said that that presumes that something is going to happen and it presumes that there's not going to be any abuse which you find is never the case that presumes. that. so many things are going to steps of some of that it was a tom cruise movie that world where you know we let's let's stop crimes before they have it does and to what extent is this a clear violation of fourth amendment and is there any pushback is there is anybody

mounting a legal pushback that there is pushback people are saying that they don't want this to happen actually a similar policy in maryland where some of these buses are being rolled out they got the policy taken out of place a few years ago they knew they were going to move forward your audio recordings and they decided that it was too invasive there was too much pushback and they stopped the policy now they're coming back in deciding to do it again so there is space for people to say we don't want this to take place and to try to get it for a vote to try to and this is being done by federal agents this is being done by the . federal state governments by sort by state go and so so the dia de just is not running this state police the state police on whatever state agencies are running this on their own public transit systems so it's not something that would have direct so the challenge it launched at the state exactly although i mean we're seeing with information sharing that it's not impossible to think that v.h.s. would then get the the recordings i mean that goes back and forth between state and federal the time and nothing happens with it there either they just collect more

and more information and don't make us any safer yes and so and we thank you so much for being so you know it's great to see you get. to the rest of the news last month on black friday and more than one hundred cities and forty six states hundreds of wal-mart employees walked off the job and were joined by thousands of supporters to raise awareness of wal-mart's low wage low benefit work environment and now the fight for better working conditions at wal-mart is going global making change at wal-mart the union if. lead a group that led the walmart protests on black friday as partnered with global union federation you and i to support a global day of action tomorrow the wal-mart workers are expected to strike in countries from brazil to india but as the movement continues to grow and more and

more people come together wal-mart budge will the world's largest corporation finally listen to the demands or even the concerns of its workers or will it continue to put corporate profits ahead of their livelihoods of the two million underpaid employees of the company has joining me now to talk more about tomorrow's global day of action is josh eidelson contributing writer to the nation salon and in these times josh welcome back thank you tom where is this participation expected in tomorrow's day of action or global is that ever would be ten countries from argentina to zambia including brazil canada the united kingdom south africa and these will be rallies by wal-mart workers many of whom have a union in their own country and are coming out in protest of the alleged attempts to silence workers in the united states who are organizing and were these oh that's interesting they're there so the organizing group how much of this is coming is

being driven by an organizing group and how much of this is a response to local grassroots demands or hopes or you know pressure as it were how much of a bottom up well the global union federation you and i has been involved for a couple months actually the same day that we saw these historic retail strikes october fourth in southern california folks from you and i clued in wal-mart workers from other countries were in town in southern california planning to launch this coalition and one of the things that came through in my interviews with those folks is the recognition that wal-mart standards in the united states are a threat to the higher standards that workers have achieved in other countries and that's why it's a mistake. always think about the race to the bottom is a race where the united states is at the top in fact there are benefits workers have won in other countries who have a union and those workers see a real threat to their conditions if wal-mart can get away with this low wage nonunion model in the united states in the long term. i understand that wal-mart is

unionized in the u.k. are there any any countries where there are unions in wal-mart's and have they ever seriously taken on wal-mart or do they just kind of you know peacefully coexist without much for. you know there are several different reasons that other countries have union wal-mart's even though the company has been aggressively fanatically nonunion in the united states one is better labor laws in the other countries another is some of these unions like in china are not directly confronting wal-mart's authority in the work place they're not they may cost the company a little money but they're not costing the company control but a very important reason is industrial actions we've seen in other countries and a great model for what could happen in the us is in the united kingdom where the warehouse workers were organized and threatened to strike in a way that would have prevented all the beer from getting to fans who were at home for the world cup and so it was that supply chain power that the warehouse workers

had that one unions the right to organize in a more robust way in the retail stores and that's something that many people hope will see in the united states of that's a fascinating story i has wal-mart made any public comments about this global action they i have not had a response to mine queries to my knowledge they have not made a comment about this aspect but their message consistently has been to the public to dismiss these actions while in private having these captive audience meetings and paying workers to be lectured to about why they shouldn't participate if my recollection is correct last time you and i have talked about this was one there was this action here in the united states. friday has wal-mart responded to that at all has there been any response since then well there's been the emergence of a group that's called associates who love wal-mart which wal-mart has sent out press about but claims not to be related to wal-mart as the company officially

though continues to say that they're not concerned they placed an op bad in a california paper saying our workers love to work here interestingly it was written by a wal-mart employee official and not by a wal-mart employee and wal-mart continues to cite internal surveys conducted by wal-mart as evidence of what their employees really think i think those results are suspect ok josh eidelson thanks so much for joining me tonight judge thank you very much. thanks. crazy alert getting on ruly in the ukraine all the partisan bickering and name calling in washington is pretty bad at least be thankful that our lawmakers don't start all over the walls in the house and senate chambers the same can be said about lawmakers in the ukraine in its first session yesterday members of the ukrainian parliament broke into a knock down drag out fight over the blocking of an election for prime minister and

other parliamentary officials if i got so bad the multiple lawmaker sustained injuries including one member of the parliament who got his here torn off eventually the lawmakers decided to cancel the session and rescheduled for today no word yet of fights broke out today as well in other news rumor has it that john boehner as challenge president obama to a fight over the fiscal cliff plays you're going to be taking place tomorrow at three pm at the white house playing that. coming up the phone lines are now open for our your take my take it live segment so if you want to chance to ask me a question live on the big picture give us a call at two or two nine zero four twenty one thirty four we'll be talking with you after the break.

we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old on a loop through. the contents and i am in total get of that i was grabbing hip hop music and. but it was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the role without you she has played.

i think. i'm. going to. say. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.